


Hello, Love, How I've Missed You

by LaShaRa



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Fluff, Klaroline, Love, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 20:12:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14838431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaShaRa/pseuds/LaShaRa
Summary: When everything is burning down around him, the way things tend to happen frequently, there is a place where Niklaus goes.





	Hello, Love, How I've Missed You

**Author's Note:**

> So I've never written a word for this fandom, but I wept over all the Klaroline scenes from 5x06, and then I sat down for an hour and wrote this. Here, have some tulip-hued escapism, may it make things better. L, this one's for you.

When everything is burning down around him, the way things tend to happen frequently, there is a place where Niklaus goes.

-

This corner of Amsterdam may not have been quite so quiet a few centuries ago, but it is quiet now. The rooms hum with it; the only sound is the steady stroke of Niklaus’ brush across the canvas. The summer sunlight slanting over the balcony is warm on the skin of his hands. Other faint stirrings reach him from open windows across the water; the murmur of waking voices, the scent of fresh coffee. It is still early. 

A sudden rattle makes him glance over. Perhaps not as early as he’d thought. A few balconies along, the young woman with the wild black curls steps into the sunlight. Her face, upturned to the light, is full of a calm peace, a oneness with the morning air. Niklaus halts his brush to study her face. There is something in her expression which reminds him of Hayley, laughing among the wolves and the flames, deep in the bayou and safe. Here and now, a man steps out onto the balcony behind her - a boy, really, lanky and sleepy-eyed, perhaps a few years younger than his companion. He reaches for her, drawing her to his bare chest; he is head and shoulders taller than her and his chin settles in her curls. She does not turn around, but something joyous steals into her smile as her hands fold over his.

Niklaus chuckles softly. Perhaps he will ask them to sit for a sketch one day soon. He finds of late that he is more moved to ask this of people. It has not yet ceased to surprise him when they agree to be made portraits of. Kol would say, a roguish spark in his eye, that he’s still got it, but Niklaus doesn’t think that’s what this is.

Suddenly the air shifts and Niklaus stiffens. He sets the paintbrush aside. A little way down the canal, a boat pulls into view from around the corner. It is laden, stem to stern, with tulips in every imaginable hue, a sunrise floating between the houses. Niklaus watches as it glides towards him, being steered gently to meet the steps that lead up from the water to the sidewalk beside the house. A cheerful, blurred farewell reaches him, and then there is a flash of bright hair, a flurry of colour, the smart click of heels on cobblestones. He finds himself smiling. Footsteps mount the wrought-iron stairs which lead to the balcony, brisk and confident, and come to a halt at the top. 

“Hello, love,” says Niklaus.

There is a pause and then Caroline closes the short space between them, stepping carefully around his easel. Her arms are brimming over with blossom, but she bends and catches his lips with hers, warm, lingering, familiar. “Hey, you,” she says, the words a response and a reassurance, her part to play in the hidden exchange he can translate instinctively after all these years. Hello, love, how I’ve missed you. 

She moves away, carrying the flowers further into the room, and he turns to watch her, because as far as he is concerned the light moves with her. She is talking, about how beautiful the fields were in the pre-dawn darkness, about the immigrant children she met among the blossoms, about the favours she called in on the way back to the city to get them all some much needed assistance from patrons of the school, gifted and human alike, and Niklaus listens and he thinks, this is the reason. This is the reason that people agree to sit for his paintings, that no one gives him a second glance as he walks the streets of Amsterdam or Vienna or whichever city he has chosen for his abode; this is the reason he can rejoice in that very lack of awe, admiration, terror, because there is something better and at long, long last, he has let it become enough, become everything.

“...and before I forget, Hope’s latest letters are in my purse, she must have just missed us in Jakarta, you’d better write back to her before she flies out here herself - Klaus?” Caroline looks up. “Everything okay? Did something happen?”

Her eyes are wide as she abandons the flowers, already thinking of possibilities, already making plans on his behalf, already working out ways to make it better, and this, this is why he loves her, one of the reasons. Because she believes, has always believed, that there is a way through to the other side. A way to something better. 

“Nothing’s happened,” he says, and he knows they can both hear his joy in being able to utter that phrase, his surprise that he is capable of this joy. “Everything is as it should be.”

Caroline hears what he hasn’t said, and she smiles, wide and brilliant and so very beautiful. As she walks back towards him, into the sunlight of this morning, Niklaus sees all the cities they have seen together, and all those they have yet to see, a thousand mornings like this and a thousand more to come. And perhaps this is also part of what calms and comforts him; the knowledge that even after that, they still have forever.

-

More frequently than he would like, when the world is burning down around him, Caroline is there too, caught in the destruction he creates around him.. Through the flames and the smoke and the blood, he watches her eyes meet his gaze halfway, and he wonders if the places she goes in these moments are anything like his.


End file.
